During a conversation with a Black man a few weeks ago, in the presence of another Black woman, it happened. Again. I felt the need to defend my hair length. As soon as the exchange ended, I was haunted. Disturbed by the incessant occurrence of having to exculpate my existence, my beauty. Before I could properly process what I was doing and stop myself, I had JUSTIFIED MY HAIR LENGTH. Justified. As if there was something wrong or ugly about it, as if I was less attractive because my hair length was modest, even average, for a Black girl. A Black man had informed me, proudly and perhaps innocently, in front of another woman with longer hair that his hair had been longer than mine “at one point.”
We’ve all heard or said The Defenses before. “My hair used to be really long BUT.” “That perm my mom forced me to get broke my hair off, girl.” “I told the hairdresser to just cut my split ends and she cut a few inches off. It’ll grow back.” “I did the big chop.” We’ve all cringed at the “bald head scallywag” jokes on the middle school playground, subconsciously brushed down gelled up baby hairs to ensure ourselves that we had edges, dodge that jab. Why is brushing down gelled up baby hairs even a thing? Doesn’t this act implicitly ingrain the message that natural edges are unruly or unsightly?

Then, the fact that this man prefaced the hair length comparison statement with “no disrespect but…” had clearly, immediately and innately activated the need for me to defend myself, defend my hair. It made the statement inherently disrespectful and suggested a hair inferiority. “Well, I’m not offended because I chopped all of my hair off. I did the big chop.” I blurted out as I recovered and attempted to hide my chagrin under the guise of enlightening my peers with indisputable facts. I might as well have said, “So you see, your hair was only longer than mine by default. You are not better than me, your hair does not grow longer or faster. I started over. So there. My hair is freaking awesome dude BE HUMBLE!”

A similar microaggression was facilitated by a white female coworker a few months prior. In the same breath of her complimenting how full, cute, and suiting my afro puff debut at work was, she denigrated another sister, A Black female acquaintance of hers that she couldn’t, for the life of her, decode why the woman had opted to wear a ponytail that was “this” (she demonstrated for dramatic effect with her finger and thumb barely separated) long.

That Sunday evening after The Defense, I moisturized and cornrowed my curls in my bedroom whilst getting lost and mesmerized by the gentle crooning of Jill Scott playing in the background of my makeshift hair salon. I was preparing for my next protective style while giving Queen Latifah in Set It Off vibes with my straight-back, tightly and neatly plaited locks. In my meditative thug life glory, I forced myself to decompress from the week’s weariness and anticipated the new beginning of the next week. I had survived yet another conventional beauty standard microaggression and had lived to defend myself another day. I wondered, “When?”

When exactly are we going to stop scrutinizing a fish by its ability to climb a tree? When we’re made of the same star essence and universe rain from which our hair, like trees and flowers, sprout. Spiral upward to greet the sun’s rays. Voluminous. Luminous. Copious. Billowing. Created to rise, magnificently blossom, and be spatially excellent. Outsmarting and gently defeating gravity in unique testament to an especially magic divinity. An enchanting intensity that somehow shines through even in a brush cut.
Our hair is meant to curl, coil, jump, and leap! Stretch and shout for joy. Vibrate, an antenna majestically intertwined with the galaxy. Humidity forecasts strong springiness with a slight chance of shrinkage and a high chance of slayage. Encounters with heat engender silkiness. Water, softly rippling waves. Air, flourishing kinks proudly riding the breeze. Requiring nourishment like the soil. A mirror of the Earth. Black Girl Radiance is not defined by hair length: Our magic is far too big and resilient for that.
Lacrisha is a healing, growth, and wellness enthusiast who likes to spend her spare time participating in sophisticated ratchet hippie thug scholar things like lamenting adulting and reading books. She is a proud alumna of both the illustrious Howard University and North Carolina Central University.

by Lwando Xaso

Beauty is fair, straight, refined, slight and dainty. Beauty is polite, non-threatening and amenable. What beauty is not, I am told, is me. This definition of beauty is manufactured ,parceled, sold and internalized by its victims. This message is commercialized for profit and by design it thrives on the destruction of women who are forced to chase a standard that is impossible to meet but will spend themselves to attain. For a time I chased it too not realizing that my autonomy and right to self- determination were under siege.

I used to stand in front of the mirror in judgement of my body. I stared back at myself and all the things I could never be and desperately wished I was because I imagined life would be easier. I am a black girl, a dark, tall black girl with a pronounced butt and hips which I have hated since their arrival 23 years ago.
A girl’s body is highly contested ground and the site of a struggle for domination. Insecure women are the easiest to dominate and to exploit. Because the standard of beauty is imported from the west, guess who is dominated and exploited the most? Black women. Women like myself whose hair is not “good”, whose eyes are not light brown, whose skin is not caramel and whose hips will never be narrow. Black women who feel invisible because the object of the hero’s affection never looks like them. Black women who have grown accustomed to not being seen and so they assume their place at the back of the room because the spotlight was never meant for them. Black women who desperately wonder if their names will ever called, if they will ever be picked.

The forces that want to pacify Black women by denying their beauty are threatened by the magic of a Black woman in full possession of herself. Serena Williams on the cover of Vanity Fair in all her Black, pregnant, naked glory is the epitome of magic.

A magic that has liberated legions of Black women. A magic that has called upon Black women to assume their rightful places at the center of the room with the spotlight shining from within rather than from above. It is a magic that neither seeks or needs permission to define itself for itself. It is a magic that has told us in unequivocal terms that we are enough. A magic that has told us that only we can own ourselves and no one else. It is a magic that is unapologetic for its presence and form. A magic that has demanded and dared us all to make an unconditional pact to love ourselves as we are at this very moment.
We are magic because despite the war that has been waged against us, we are still here and we dare to shine. Serena, in just being herself, has reclaimed what beauty means and ignited a revolution. This Black woman has turned the world on its head and now we live on our terms.

Lwando Xaso is an attorney fron Johannesburg, South Africa.

Are weaves the not-so-hidden force that’s tearing down the black community? At times, you would think so. From lectures and films to op-eds and social media roasts, it seems like everyone wants to weigh-in on why black women need to stop rocking store-bought hair. This discourse is filled with men and women using their extreme views to proclaim what styles equate self-love and putting down sisters who don’t fit that image.

It needs to stop.


Type the word “weave” into Google and you’re guaranteed to see a stream of photos, blogs, and videos with captions and commentary poking fun at sisters “spending all that money on fake hair” or shallow hypotheses on why sisters don’t want to embrace their natural beauty. The interesting thing in all this is that those who tend to belittle women for wearing hair extensions tend to ignore that: (1) historically and culturally, we (men especially) have participated in upholding the Eurocentric standards many black women strive to attain and (2) women wear extensions for various reasons. It’s not always about insecurity.

While there is a need to unpack what we've been programmed to find as beautiful, I'm strongly against shaming sisters' hair choices in the process. Condescendingly telling a “queen” she is “better than” her sew-in is not the solution. The way a person styles their hair does not inherently equate with a level of “wokeness” or self-confidence. Every person sporting locs doesn’t necessarily ascribe to pan-African thought (e.g. Whoopi Goldberg) and on the flipside, a woman wearing a weave is not automatically ashamed of her natural hair.

My hair has always been natural (not chemically processed) but I’ve had about every hairstyle you can think of - mohawk, braids, highlights. My head has seen it all. Weaves have allowed me the versatility to protect my natural hair and try out new looks without making permanent changes to my hair. There are many women with plenty of hair who do the same such as Beyoncé, Gabrielle Union, or Taraji P. Henson.

And it’s not just black women. What sets us apart is the highly political relationship we’ve had with our hair while living in a society that constantly upholds Eurocentric beauty standards. A woman should have the freedom to explore and figure out what fits her best and style her hair however she feels most comfortable​ without receiving backlash because she’s not fulfilling someone’s trivial standard of Blackness.

It is also important to recognize that hair extensions and wigs are nothing new. It’s something that been seen in cultures throughout time from ancient Egyptians to Japanese Geishas.

What’s wonderful about today’s natural hair movement is that it has broadened the idea of beauty and given a new generation of women the courage and confidence to embrace our hair textures, despite living in a society that has historically made us feel inferior and unattractive in our afros or coils.

This mentality has undoubtedly been internalized and perpetuated among black people, and often times by black men in particular - from Martin poking fun at Pam for her “bee dee bees” to Yung Berg proudly speaking on his “pool test.” To drag black women for sporting hairstyles that we’ve been told for centuries will make us more appealing, is both hypocritical and insensitive.

I still have memories of my older cousins making a fuss over my tightly coiled hair, being probed about why my mother wouldn’t relax my hair, and the humiliation I felt when my crush noticed the summer humidity wouldn’t let my press ‘n’ curl be great during recess.

Feeling confident to embrace your natural hair in a world that will call Kylie Jenner a trailblazer for sporting a few cornrows, yet label a black woman ghetto for a same look, is no doubt a revolutionary act. But putting ourselves above someone who opts for a different look is counter-productive. Our hair continues to be a political commodity for the world to gawk at and take their digs. As a community, it should be our business to do otherwise.



If we’re really about shifting beauty standards and uplifting black women, instead of ranting on weaves, respect a woman’s choice to rock the hairstyle of her choice and remind her that she’s beautiful either way. Until we fully accept and celebrate each other in the full spectrum of our appearances, we are only participating in the problem.

Photo: Shutterstock.com

Shahida Muhammad was raised in Philadelphia and is currently based abroad in Colombia. Her writing tends to lie within the spaces of Black culture, identity, and womanhood. For more, follow @ShahidaMuhammad on Twitter.

by Yvette Tetteh

“You know, I can just tell you are a true African Queen.”

I draw my bottle of beer closer towards me, let out a quiet sigh, take a sip, and decide to take the bait along with it.

by Stacia L. Brown for The New Republic

When I cut my hair last summer, I sheared 12 inches of chemically straightened hair from the coarser curls closest to my scalp. I had only an inch of hair in its natural state; at the time, I felt free.

by Altheria Gaston


It may not be on the list of most popular plastic surgery procedures, but many women are doing more than squats to achieve the much-desired (by some) luscious, curvaceous butt. As our cultural obsession with big booties grows, so does the availability of buttocks augmentation, including injections and implants. (A quick Google search turned up at least five such businesses in my area.) Unfortunately, not all of these procedures are being performed by skilled, licensed medical professionals. These butt augmentations are frequently done underground. Such is the case of a Dallas woman, Wykesha Reid, who likely died while receiving butt injections at a local business that was billed as an eyelash salon. As a resident of the Dallas/Fort Worth area, I first heard the story on local news after Reid’s body was discovered abandoned in the salon on February 19, 2015, the day after she went in for the procedure.

by Kwanzaa Imani


If you were on social media on or around Friday, March 6th, you probably saw the hashtag #BlackOutDay. Between Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook, Black people on social media made such overwhelming use of the tag that it not only trended on all three websites, but gained mainstream media’s attention as well. And I have to admit, as a person who was there for the original conception of #BlackOutDay, I am beyond proud of my black online family.

Last week we saw a flurry of action in the social media sphere after E!'s Fashion Police Giuliana Rancic made a comment about young actress Zendaya Coleman's faux locs at the Academy Awards. As the mother of a young teen who LOVES fashion, we often watch post award show wrap-ups to see what others thought of looks we liked and to catch up on what we might have missed. My daughter and I loved Zendaya's look and were so excited to see her at the awards, so I was really disheartened when we heard Giuliana's derogatory remarks about her "looking like she smells of patchouli oil and weed.”

by Kesiena Boom


A pervasive lie about Black women, perpetuated mainly by white women, states that we want to be white. When we relax our hair, or get weaves, or talk “proper,” or read books, we are doing so because we wish we were born white. We are so dissatisfied with our Blackness that we long for whiteness and the supposed perfection that it entails.

by Celeste Graham


Over the past three years I’ve watched as the natural hair movement and Afrocentricity have made a major comeback into fashion and pop culture at large. It’s everywhere. From our clothes to the music we listen to and most noticeably, in our hair. Braids, afros, twist-outs, wash-and-go’s, protective styles. The list of hairstyles is endless. Each natural hair care line claims to have all of the right ingredients to moisturize, nourish, and help our natural hair reach its fullest potential. Within all of this natural hair frenzy, of course, are the politics of hair. What should natural hair look like? What is considered to be “attractive” natural hair and what’s considered to be unattractive?

But more importantly: Why does it even matter?

by Kamiiya Williams

I was in college when Lil Wayne’s song “Every Girl” first came out. I admit, it was one of my favorite songs to play on my iPhone while I worked out in the gym and it got me going at the house parties. However, the first line of his verse always stood out to me: “I like a long-haired, thick redbone,” as it described what many men thought to be the "ideal" woman.

When I was 10 years old, I had the biggest crush on my best friend at the time. He was a little black boy named Richard, whom all the girls at my elementary school adored. One day, I brought in an old picture of me from first or second grade, for some type of school project. Richard looked back and forth between me and the picture a couple of times. Finally he said, “You’re darker now. You should have stayed the way you were before. You looked better like that.”

At the time, what he said didn’t really register. I just thought he was being an ass. But then I realized that he truly believed being light skinned meant you were more beautiful. At that moment, the term “uncomfortable in my own skin,” took on a whole new meaning.

Fast forward to today. I have since “liked” and dated men of different races. Despite Richard's hurtful words, I never held a grudge against him or other black men. Matter of fact, I even dated Richard briefly at the end of high school (A long story for a different day. I’ll need some wine for that.)
I’ve been going strong for a year with my current boyfriend, who is one of the most amazing human beings I’ve ever met. He also happens to be white. I love people of all races. You’d think that would be a good thing, but to some, not so much. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had people (mostly in my own family) joke about how I would be the one “mostly likely to marry a white man," disregarding the fact that my momma raised me to see what’s in a man’s heart, not how much melanin he has.

If every little black girl had someone like Richard tell her that she wasn’t pretty because of her skin, how could we expect her to be comfortable with herself and ANY man, no matter what his race may be?

I think that there is some type of misconception with a lot of people. They think that by dating outside your race, you are losing yourself or your “blackness.” That’s not the case. If anything, you discover MORE about who you are and where you stand in this world.

For the longest time, I hated my natural hair. I thought it was difficult to manage, too kinky, too everything. That’s part of the reason why I spent most of my life with a perm. I did braids on and off, and then a weave when I went to college, but I never wanted to embrace my hair’s natural state. It wasn’t until I met my current boyfriend and I moved to New York that I even considered going natural.

It was a mix between his advocacy and all of the beautiful styles of natural black women I saw in New York—and in my own mother—that made me finally give in. Instead of ‘kinky,” I now think of my hair as “fluffy” (my boyfriend's word). Instead of dreading coming home and “dealing” with my hair, I now look forward to experimenting with different styles for the next day. (Shout out to mom for sending me all those fabulous YouTube hair videos.)

To clarify, I've always loved myself, blackness and all.
At times, I doubted myself, just like everyone does at some point or another, and I can’t blame anyone else for that. My insecurities are my own. What insecurities I had then are minimal, if not nonexistent now. I know this is partly due to me growing up and maturing, but it is also because I have supportive people in my life, telling me that I’m beautiful, telling me that it’s OK to me. (I may be 22, but I still need those affirmations every once in a while.)

I don’t think of myself as “being with a white man.” I think of myself as being with a man that challenges my mind, respects my body, and embraces my spirit. I’m with someone who protects me, yet makes me feel free. I’m not expected to look a certain way or behave a certain way when I'm with him. I’m just expected to be the way God created me to be.

I guess what it comes to is that any man of any race can tear you down. So when you find the one that holds you up, you can’t let him go.

Photo: Shutterstock

by Anna Gibson


When I was younger, I recall a Christmas when I opened my gift and realized I’d been given a black barbie as opposed to the white one I usually got. At the time I was about age 4 or 5, and I didn’t even know they came with darker skin. When I questioned my mother about the sudden change, she simply said, “Because It’s important that you see yourself in the world around you.”

by Saaraa Bailey


Way before the world was “keeping up” with her and her family, Kim Kardashian was just another the young, wealthy girl living in Southern California. As the former girlfriend of Michael Jackson’s nephew and the goddaughter of O.J. Simpson, Kim was able to enjoy the fruits of white privilege amidst the company of high profile black men, way before her days as an A-lister. And her high profile relationships with a number of black athletes and celebrities would also help her transition from Beverly Hills beauty to international superstar.

Over the last decade, black women’s hair has become a topic of discussion, not only amongst salon goers, but also throughout society. Chris Rock’s documentary “Good Hair” gave the world insight into the secret society of relaxers, wigs and weave. Since then, women of color have embraced their right to decide how they wear their hair and the processes they undergo to achieve that look.

I want to be clear and explicit: I love my (natural) hair. I really do! Like most Black women, my relationship with my hair is a reflection of my relationship with my culture, my womanhood, and my journey. Each hairstyle and phase I’ve gone through with my hair is a marker for where I was in my life, what my values were, and how I felt about myself.

by Sharlia LeBreton-Gulley

“So… You KNOW you’re Latina, right?”

That was a legitimate assertion once made to me by a proud Latino brother while I stood behind the counter at the Vitamin Shoppe in Pasadena California bagging his protein, testosterone booster and multivitamins.

“Actually, I’m African.”

My mom suggested me a few years ago that when prompted, I should respond that I am definitively “African” to inquisitions of my racial, cultural and/or ethnic background. Typically most people don’t even understand the difference between the three “distinctions,” so this wouldn’t be a problem if I began simply responding “African,” when asked my background, right? What I found though, was that most people simply could not accept that by me claiming an African identity , that I could look the way I do. I’ve gotten everything from, “But you’re so pretty,” to “ No, your grandparents or somebody must be mixed or something.”  One of my sisters once told me her response to these intrusive questions was to reply that she is mixed, “[w]ith slavery and oppression.”

Blackness is ubiquitously positioned to be the consistent antithesis of all that is good and valuable as it relates to beauty, intelligence and other characteristics of prestige or merit. With an indoctrinated ideology of anti-blackness, it is almost impossible for people to accept black as being beautiful in and of itself and so people dig to justify black beauty with a connection to any racial or ethnic “other.” We are taught and encouraged to disassociate from blackness.

With over 180 million people of African descent living throughout the America’s, it is crucial to honor the unique experiences of the African peoples and their places of geographic displacement caused by the period of enslavement and colonization which by and large has helped to create the Latino/a identity. We are all well aware of the atrocities of these periods of history; the raping, mutilations, separation, religious perversions and the like, but for my original point, let’s just reexamine something to make it very palpable.

“I would never claim my rapist.”

This was a sentiment expressed in a lecture by Rosa Clemente (2008 Green Party Presidential candidate, Community organizer, Hip-Hop activist and Independent journalist) in a talk on the ”AfroLatina Identity and Critical Approaches to Blackness.”

Enslaved African and indigenous women were exploited for their reproductive potential for centuries, giving rise to the various “mulatto/a, morienho, mestizo” etc, variations of African descending children. These children, though (sometimes) ethnically categorized into a different race or ethnicity, than their mothers would typically still be in the same social position as their black mothers with some social privileges. Why then are we in such a hurry to turn our backs on our mothers, both literally and in the sense of Mother Africa, in an attempt to yet again reach and aspire to “whiteness?”

“Black is beautiful,” but what is “black” and whose standard of “beautiful” are we using? The approach to blackness and concepts of beauty need to be critically analyzed and re-imagined further than a simplistic assertion. We need to look deeply into the identification and lack of identification with blackness and beauty especially within our Diaspora and our AfroLatino/a global community.

CBC - It was about a year ago that Queen Cee Robinson tried to find a doll that resembled her daughter and had a revelation – there weren’t any.

Robinson had seen black Barbie dolls before. Most of them wore bikinis, and they all had long, straight hair. And they all looked the same — sidekicks to the white dolls, or as Robinson describes them, “Barbie’s token black friend.”

That started Robinson down a path of giving dolls makeovers — providing them with loose curls and dreadlocks, hijabs and sarongs, all in the name of giving little girls a realistic image of themselves.

Black women of the world. We really are something aren’t we? A force, really. Constantly being stomped to the ground only for us to rise up and stampede whoever thought they could get away with such a thing. Silly rabbits of the universe continue to reach even when they know good and well they will catch hell from our wrath for even thinking for a second they could say anything remotely defamatory about us.